Dragon Fantasy Book II Review: Channeling classic JRPGs, for better and for worse

Dragon Fantasy Book II $15.00 Dragon Fantasy Book II is a game at odds with itself, improving on a timeworn genre but often fumbling the fundamentals.

So how do you feel about 16-bit JRPGs? Think Super Nintendo era: wandering about world maps as a colorful sprite, taking turn-based swipes at fantastical monsters, and tapping through dialogue trees on a quest to save the world. They compensated for the technological limitations of the mid-'90s with rich, sweeping narratives, and occasionally devolved into nigh endless grind-fests, trudging through repetitive battle sequences to grow strong enough to overcome increasingly tougher challenges.

The genre has always been a bit polarizing, and its popularity has waned in the face of modern action-RPGs and MMOs. But those of us who love them rest assured knowing that the Chrono Triggers and EarthBounds never die—they just get re-released, or re-imagined by plucky indie developers with a penchant for spritework and MIDI tunes. Available on the PlayStation 3 and Vita, Dragon Fantasy Book II is one such tribute: a $15 love letter to the good old days that’s unapologetically old-school, yet manages to iron out many of the genre’s more annoying wrinkles. But it’s a game at odds with itself, skirting many of the JRPG genre’s flaws but plagued by a desire to revamp time-honored (and timeworn) mechanics and inject personality and humor, often at the expense of narrative and compelling gameplay.

If you don’t like JRPGs, you’re gonna have a bad time. Dragon Fantasy Book II (hereafter DFB2) makes no effort to deny the source of its inspiration, from the sweeping introduction replete with narrative “cutscenes” involving maiden-munching dragons, to an epic musical score, menu-driven turn-based battles, and the requisite hunt for better loot. You’ll tap through dialogue boxes to learn that the hero, Ogden, has allied with pirates on a quest to save the world—a magic crystal, betrayals, and plot twists are involved.

Dragon Fantasy Book II doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Much of the story is presumably laid out in the first game in the series (which I haven’t played), but the game does an amicable job of getting you up to speed, tossing you into combat relatively quickly to give you a feel for the mechanics, while doling out bits of narrative along the way. DFB2 goes out of its way to avoid being taken seriously, which is at once a blessing and an annoying curse. Chock full of knowing winks to pop culture and in-jokes, you’ll tackle an Earthbound-esque cast of nonsensical foes—including Land Sharks and Rock Men equipped with blue helmets—and encounter a whimsical cast of characters, including a seemingly omnipresent pirate ally who admits his only raison d’être is to push the action along.

And you’ll fight. A lot. Fortunately, combat feels refreshing. There are no random battles here: the enemy is always visible, wander the dungeons you’re exploring. Get close enough and they’ll give chase—if they catch you, combat menus will slide into place to allow you to assign commands. As you fight, you’ll need to take enemy positions into account, as baddies will occasionally change position, weaseling their way out of the effective range of some of your abilities. You’ll also want to keep an eye on the foes you aren’t fighting—they’ll continue to scamper about while you’re mid-battle, and if a pack gets close to your characters, they’ll join in the fight. It doesn’t happen too often, but this randomized element of danger is actually kind of exciting, and left me thinking about positioning myself while luring enemies towards me, lest the baddies I couldn’t see show up and overwhelm my party.

You can recruit all manner of foes to fight for you.

It’s rather nice that fighting feels fresh, because you’ll be doing a lot of it: the game suffers from that JRPG need to all but overwhelm you with foes to fight, padding the time between narrative chunks with wave after wave of repetitive fisticuffs. A Pokémon-inspired capture system allows you to trap just about any foe and recruit them to your team, which assuages the monotony a bit by given you a seemingly endless array of team members with unique abilities to wade through. The game also takes another note from Earthbound and will let you beat enemies who are much weaker than you automatically—refreshing, if you do a bit of backtracking and tire of fighting the same old foes.

DFB2 gets a lot of things right, but it ultimately still plays like fan fiction. All the clever little jokes start to feel like so much fluff rather quickly, and after the hundredth quip about Mr. and Mrs. Rock’s marital issues during their attacks, you begin to realize you’ve been fighting the same foes (or variations on a theme) for hours.

The game prides itself on offering plenty of sidequests, but these amount to little more than tapping through a bit of NPC dialogue, and remembering to kill or capture a particular baddie you were probably going to encounter anyway. The art and animation is often gorgeous, with neat little effects for spells and combat abilities. And then you’ll notice how static much of the rest of the world is, overland streams or indoor fireplaces seemingly frozen in time.

You’re forced to navigate the poorly-designed menu system on a regular basis.

But the greatest offender—besides a poorly designed ship-combat minigame—is the menu system, which is simply awful on the PlayStation 3. It’s clearly scaled for displays with much lower resolutions, which means scrolling through endless, poorly organized lists of equipment, items and abilities every time you head to a shop or choose a spell in combat, with much of your HDTV's screen real estate wasted.

It makes a bit of sense—buying the game gives you access to both versions, and Sony’s excellent Cross Save feature lets you store your save game in the cloud, then pick up the adventure on whichever device you’d like. The experience fits much better on a Vita, and you can use touch controls to zip about the menus with ease. A tiny development team necessarily needs to optimize, and working within the Vita’s constraints and scaling up makes sense. But JRPGs have been handling item-wrangling for decades—you’ve taken inspiration from most everything else, just add a few sorting options, direct visual cues when thumbing through weapon upgrades, and at the very least the ability to buy more than one item at a time.

There’s a lot to like here—love, even. My inner curmudgeon can get annoyed with a comedic take on a Serious Business sort of genre, but it all feels like a light-hearted conversation between fans of a bygone era.

But is it worth $15? If you’re a JRPG fan itching to try something new, it’s a fun cross-platform romp, best experienced on a PlayStation Vita—PlayStation Plus subscribers can get it for $12 for the next few days. If you’re not a JRPG fan, you should probably just steer clear. New to the genre and on the fence? Well… they’re both almost two decades old, but Chrono Trigger is on the PlayStation Network and Earthbound is on the Nintendo Wii U’s eShop, and both will only set you back $10—start there, and circle back when you’re done or Dragon Fantasy Book II goes on sale.

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Feds developing guidelines to help businesses to better secure their IT systems

Following through on an order earlier this year from U.S. President Barack Obama, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is rapidly developing a set of guidelines and best practices to help organizations better secure their IT systems.

The agency has released a draft of its preliminary cybersecurity framework and is seeking feedback from industry.

The agency is scheduled to release a full preliminary draft in October, for public review. It will then issue the final 1.0 version of the framework in February 2014 and continue to update the framework thereafter.

When finished, the framework will provide guidance for organizations on how to manage cybersecurity risk, “in a manner similar to financial, safety, and operational risk,” the document states.

In February the White House issued an executive order tasking NIST to develop a cybersecurity framework, one based on existing standards, practices and procedures that have proven to be effective.

In July, NIST issued an outline of the framework and held a workshop in San Diego to fill in some details. This draft incorporates some of that work, and was released to gather more feedback ahead of the next workshop, to be held in Dallas starting on Sept. 11.

“The Framework complements, and does not replace, an organization’s existing business or cybersecurity risk management process and cybersecurity program. Rather, the organization can use its current processes and leverage the framework to identify opportunities to improve an organization’s cybersecurity risk management,” the draft read.

When finished, the framework will consist of three parts. One component, called the core functions, will be a compilation of commonly practiced activities and references. The second component, the implementation tiers, provides guidance on how to manage cybersecurity risks. The third component, the framework profile, provides guidance on how to integrate the core functions within a cybersecurity risk strategy, or plan.

On Twitter, framework ideas are being submitted and discussed with the hashtag #NISTCSF.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for the IDG News Service.
More by Joab Jackson

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Twitter acquires Trendrr to get a better handle on tweets about TV

Twitter has acquired Trendrr, a data analysis company, to better leverage users’ tweets about television to draw in more advertisers.

Trendrr analyzes data from social media sites such as Twitter to help businesses grow their brands. The company’s products help networks, television studios, brands and media agencies use the insights it gathers to grow, Trendrr explains on its website. Some of the company’s clients include ABC, MTV, Telemundo and Univision.

Twitter confirmed the acquisition in a tweet, saying that Trendrr would help the social network “build great tools for the rest of the TV ecosystem.” However, the company could not be immediately reached to comment further on the deal. Terms were not disclosed.

Television is becoming increasingly important to Twitter, and information that the service gathers around users’ TV activity could help to drive future advertising deals.

The company recently announced the national availability of its television ad-targeting program to let TV marketers push out branded content to people on Twitter if those users are tweeting about certain shows.

A study previously released by the market-research company Nielsen suggested that such a program could give the social network a revenue boost. The study’s findings showed that broadcast TV tune-in rates led to increased activity on Twitter, and vice versa.

Twitter’s real-time data about users’ activity on the site was what made the social network uniquely compelling to Trendrr, CEO Mark Ghuneim said on the company’s blog.

“We think we can help amplify even stronger the power of that connection to the moment inside of Twitter,” he said.

Curatorr, the company’s chief Twitter product, “will work with media companies, marketers, and display ecosystem partners to create compelling user experiences,” Ghuneim explained.

Twitter, therefore, could use Trendrr’s technology both to develop new products to encourage users to tweet around TV and other brands, and also drive more advertising arrangements based on data gathered by Trendrr.

Trendrr said it will honor its existing contracts for its Trendrr.TV service, but that it would not establish new ones going forward.

Twitter faces mounting pressure to further monetize its site as it competes with rivals such as Facebook, with a possible IPO also looming. The company’s current suite of advertising products includes promoted tweets, which lets marketers place promotional tweets into certain users’ feeds.

Twitter claims to have roughly 200 million active users.

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Review: Payday 2 proves robbing banks is better with friends

Payday 2 $30.00 Payday 2, the sequel to Overkill Software’s 2011 heist game, is great—as long as you have good friends to play it with. Otherwise, it's a frustrating and unintuitive experience.

I’m sitting in the hidden basement of my safehouse, thumbing the safety back and forth on my silenced pistol. The radio buzzes to life. “There’s a bank downtown…” and I’m off, sprinting out the door in my well-tailored suit, mask and pistol and assault rifle concealed underneath.

I jump in the van with my three fellow thieves, decked out in similarly immaculate suits. The ride over is quiet. I take the time to study blueprints of the bank, wishing I’d studied architecture in college.

We pull up outside the bank. The voice on the radio tells us an associate stashed a thermal drill out back of the bank; we’ll need it to bust the safe open and steal the cash. I’m excited. Though I’m masquerading as a master thief, this is my first robbery. I prepare to “case the joint,” like the criminal masterminds I've seen on TV.

You and your associates can case the joint before you don your masks and get to work—just try to act casual.

I walk into the bank, trying to plan my mode of attack. A security guard apparently spots the assault rifle I—for whatever reason—foolishly believed I could conceal under my slim-cut suit jacket. “Hey you!” the guard shouts. An alarm sounds. Time to go to work.

Over the blaring klaxon I hear myself mutter “Here we go,” as I hit the key to pull my sad clown mask down over my face. The cop opens fire on me, and I kill him. We haven’t even retrieved the drill yet. An entire SWAT team quickly swarms our position and murders everyone.

“Your [sic] a god damn idiot,” says one of my fellow team members in the chat.

Welcome to Payday 2.

Payday 2, like its predecessor, is a game about robberies, heists, and (occasionally) capers developed by Overkill Software. You play as part of a four-man band of thieves, sort of the Beatles of breaking-and-entering, as you gallivant around town, steal money, cook meth, and kill a lot of cops and stuff.

Jobs range from simplistic, one-day romps to complex, multiday endeavors. Short jobs make you less money, but if you fail a long job on the last day you give up all the progress you made earlier. Each time you run a heist, various things (such as item locations) will change, so theoretically even the same map can be different on each run-through.

Use stolen cash and ill-gotten skill points to upgrade your equipment and unlock new abilities.

As you pull off more heists you’ll upgrade your weapons, buy new masks, unlock new missions, and gain valuable skills in any of four tech trees. Leveling up the Technician class will grant access to C4, for example, while Masterminds learn to intimidate police.

Each class is useful. So useful it’s hard to decide what to focus on at first. The developers give you the option to respec your upgrade points at any time, but most of the money you spent on those upgrades is lost in the process. It’s a system designed to reward picking a class and sticking with it, especially since most of the best upgrades are locked to the highest levels.

In theory, the ideal Payday 2 team is a mix of all classes: one Mastermind, one Enforcer, one Technician, one Ghost. The Ghost could go in first to jam the alarms and cameras. The other three could then sprint in, the Technician drilling into the safes (or blowing them open with C4) while the Mastermind and Enforcer take hostages.

What a glorious world that would be.

I really want to enjoy Payday 2. The idea of pulling the perfect job—planning a job in a warehouse somewhere with a ragtag group of like-minded thieves, casing a bank, sprinting in, taking hostages, cracking the safe, and escaping with the cash before the police show up—stimulates the part of my brain that loved watching Ocean's Eleven.

Payday 2 is not Ocean’s Eleven.

Waiting for the thermal drill to crack the bank vault is one of the highlights of any good heist.

The worst part is: it could be. I can tell that just beyond my reach is a much deeper, more fulfilling game than what I played. There is an amazing heist game inside Payday 2. It’s just hidden behind so many barriers that most newcomers are never going to find it, and instead are going to get bored.

Payday 2, without friends, is just not much fun.

Talking about the “ideal” Payday 2 team is an exercise in futility unless you have a group of friends to play with, and that’s the crux of a serious problem: this game is just not a lot of fun when you’re hooked up with random teammates. You’ll end up in a game with three Enforcers and one Mastermind, or two Masterminds, a low-level Technician, and a Ghost.

A typical game of Payday 2 goes like this: Everyone tries to be stealthy for about thirty seconds. Someone makes one wrong move (say, triggering a camera by accident or standing a foot too close to a security guard). All hell breaks loose. Everyone pulls on their masks and starts murdering cops. And then murdering cops. And then murdering cops. And then murdering more cops. And then murdering SWAT members. And then murdering stronger SWAT members. And then the safe busts open after six or seven minutes, you grab the cash, and toddle towards the escape van while murdering more cops.

Or even worse, you’re occasionally paired with someone who doesn’t want to play the game stealthy and just triggers the alarm as fast as possible. Then—you guessed it!—you’ll be forced to deal with the police, in the form of 5.56x45mm rounds to the head.

This is a pretty common sight while playing Payday 2 with other people.

The game isn’t helped by the utter lack of any tutorial. You can play the same missions offline as online, with bots helping out, but it’s not a big help. For some baffling reason the AI team members won’t carry any loot, so while online a requirement like “Secure four bags” only requires one trip, the same mission offline has you run back and forth by yourself four separate times while the bots shoot at police in random spurts.

The game also won’t teach you, for instance, how to yell at civilians so they’ll get down on the ground and remain hostages, or how to answer guard’s radios so you don’t trigger an alarm while you think you’re stealthily taking down the opposition.

This leads to random games flooded with people who don’t fully understand the mechanics available, making it more likely that every match turns into a giant fragfest. I’m not saying this to be judgmental—I was guilty of the same flaws when I started out. I simply didn’t realize that standing next to a guard while not even wearing my mask yet would be enough to set off the alarm, because it wasn’t conveyed to me ahead of time.

The community is also (like many co-op games) toxic to newcomers, and many game hosts kick users below a certain level or flip out when the match goes sour.

Convince three friends to heist with you, however, and Payday 2 is an entirely different game. It’s deeper, more tactical, with a lot more of that Ocean’s Eleven vibe.

With a group of friends, each of you can level up a different tech tree and grow your team’s effectiveness on all fronts, the various puzzle pieces that are the four classes interlocking seamlessly. Everyone feels essential, nobody is underpowered. You can coordinate and pull off the perfect job, or at least get close.

Payday 2 is way more fun to play when it's your actual friend picking you up off the ground instead of some bumbling AI automaton.

And when one of your friends eventually screws up, you’ll probably laugh and tease him or her about it. You’re all learning the systems together as a team, not as adversaries. It’s silly fun, not annoying.

It’s clear this format is what Overkill had in mind. The few times I could put together a game filled with friends, I completely understood why Payday 2 works. Planning out and executing a plan this complex is satisfying. Improvising when it all goes wrong, trying to manage ten problems at once, is even livelier.

Most people are stuck with the lesser version of Payday 2. They’re stuck playing this game with random people or (even worse) by themselves. And there’s no sugarcoating it: Payday 2, without friends, is just not much fun.

The systems are all there, the missions are the same, the core concepts are the same, but I quickly find myself getting frustrated in public matches. I don’t feel like we’re a group of master thieves at all; rather, we’re the most inept bunch of losers on the planet. We’re a bunch of Beavis and Buttheads who went, “Heh, wouldn’t it be funny to rob a bank?” then managed to buy assault rifles and silly masks.

So I guess go to some Meetups or something. Make some friends. There’s still no other game quite like Payday 2, and at its best the game is an enjoyable (if somewhat repetitive) experience. It’s just a shame so few people will ever play it at that way.

Note: This review covers the PC version of Payday 2. We've had reports of PS3 users running into network issues with the game.

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Nokia updates Lumia smartphones with camera app, better imaging

Nokia has started rolling out the Amber software update to its Lumia smartphones, which will allow users to take better pictures and get new camera apps.

The Finnish handset maker continues to put a lot of effort into improving camera functionality and picture quality on its Windows Phone-based Lumia smartphones.

The Amber update brings improved algorithms for better noise reduction, color reproduction, exposure control and autofocus. On the Lumia 920, controls to adjust the ISO settings of the camera from 800 to 3200 allow even better low-light performance, Nokia said in a blog post on Thursday.

After installing the update, users will also be able to get the Smart Camera app, which premiered on the Lumia 925. It includes features such as Best Shot, Action Shot and Change Faces. The latter allows users to create better group pictures by choosing the best from a series of images or removing unwanted objects. Action Shot lets users combine shots of people in movement into one image.

The quality of images taken with the Smart Camera app will be affected by the performance of each phone. On the Lumia 720, 620 and 520, the burst mode used for some effects takes seven pictures rather than ten, for example.

NokiaNokia Lumia 928

In addition to the Amber update, the Pro Camera app is available for the 920, 925, and 928, Nokia said. The app's user interface has a number of sliders that lets users control camera settings such as shutter speed, exposure value, ISO settings, white balance and the manual focus. The app is also available on the 1020.

Amber isn't just about imaging; Nokia has also added a feature called Glance Screen, which adds a clock to the standby screen. It also adds indicators to show when the phone is running on a low battery or when the phone is charging or set to silent mode.

The software won't be available on the 520 and 625, because those two smartphones have a smaller display memory, according to Nokia.

Two features from older phones are also making an appearance in Amber: flipping the phone over to mute an incoming call and a double-tap on the screen to unlock the screen.

The Lumia 920 and 820 in selected countries as well as the 521, 810, and 928 in the U.S. will get the update first. Owners of the 520, 620 and 720 will have to wait a bit longer, but Nokia expects everyone will get Amber by end September.

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Nokia updates Lumia smartphones with camera app, better imaging

Nokia has started rolling out the Amber software update to its Lumia smartphones, which will allow users to take better pictures and get new camera apps.

The Finnish handset maker continues to put a lot of effort into improving camera functionality and picture quality on its Windows Phone-based Lumia smartphones.

The Amber update brings improved algorithms for better noise reduction, color reproduction, exposure control and autofocus. On the Lumia 920, controls to adjust the ISO settings of the camera from 800 to 3200 allow even better low-light performance, Nokia said in a blog post on Thursday.

After installing the update, users will also be able to get the Smart Camera app, which premiered on the Lumia 925. It includes features such as Best Shot, Action Shot and Change Faces. The latter allows users to create better group pictures by choosing the best from a series of images or removing unwanted objects. Action Shot lets users combine shots of people in movement into one image.

The quality of images taken with the Smart Camera app will be affected by the performance of each phone. On the Lumia 720, 620 and 520, the burst mode used for some effects takes seven pictures rather than ten, for example.

NokiaNokia Lumia 928

In addition to the Amber update, the Pro Camera app is available for the 920, 925, and 928, Nokia said. The app's user interface has a number of sliders that lets users control camera settings such as shutter speed, exposure value, ISO settings, white balance and the manual focus. The app is also available on the 1020.

Amber isn't just about imaging; Nokia has also added a feature called Glance Screen, which adds a clock to the standby screen. It also adds indicators to show when the phone is running on a low battery or when the phone is charging or set to silent mode.

The software won't be available on the 520 and 625, because those two smartphones have a smaller display memory, according to Nokia.

Two features from older phones are also making an appearance in Amber: flipping the phone over to mute an incoming call and a double-tap on the screen to unlock the screen.

The Lumia 920 and 820 in selected countries as well as the 521, 810, and 928 in the U.S. will get the update first. Owners of the 520, 620 and 720 will have to wait a bit longer, but Nokia expects everyone will get Amber by end September.

Follow TechHive on Tumblr today.

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